A new age of design portfolio sites
I have had my professional website at Fully Operational for almost 15 years. What started as a test to build an HTML website for myself (I failed) turned into a Squarespace site I really only used when I was in the job market. Thankfully, I have not had to search for too many jobs in that time, but my trusty portfolio site always comes in handy when the time comes.
Last week, over the course of 2 days, I converted my $190/year Squarespace site into a self-hosted site that will end up costing me about $50 is services up front and $10 per year going forward. I fired up my new friend Cursor, who brought along their friend Claude Code, and asked, “Build me a portfolio site.” I gave Cursor my existing site, my LinkedIn URL, a copy of my resume, and 4 inspiration sites to work from. Over the next 3 hours, the site was planned, built, committed to my GitHub repo, deployed onto the correct URL, and the new and improved Fully Operational was born.
I did run into some token limits with Cursor, but for $50 a month, I was free and clear. I have already downgraded back to free as we work through some minor tweaks.
This process was incredibly fast and pretty fun, but it was not perfect. I spent about the same amount of time building the initial site as I did troubleshooting why 2 of the homepage images didn’t load properly. I also had countless iterations where something was committed and deployed, but was, in fact, not. Was it less fustrating that me dusting off my HTML/CSS skills and starting from scratch, yes. Was it a one-shot miracle of technological advancement? No.
This process gave me something I could actually use and updated my portfolio site, which was much needed. I have tried a handful of other, more complex projects, but they all run out of steam at the 75% mark.
I am curious what you are all doing with agentic coding help. Send me your coolest projects!